The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

noahpinion.substack.com

29 points3bproblem9 comments

I think Eric Weinstein's model is far simpler.

Institutionally embedded growth obligations have deranged their leadership as it became apparent their model was unsustainable, and all the ethical leaders jumped ship. This morally more flexible leadership that remained then made increasingly fraudulent claims to lure in the next set of victims into what transformed into a Ponzi scheme.

> ... there are now almost as many people majoring in computer science as in all of the humanities put together

Software really is eating the world.

The implicit argument here is that humanities grads are somehow more likely to "rebel" because they are disaffected due to overproduction of similar deluded or "fake" elites. This is like a 90s deadbeats vs suits style bifurcation and there's no numbers provided to specifically prove "radicalisation" and "rebellion" only amongst humanities grads.

As a result, EOT seems to enter spotlight effect territory where influential socialists who have humanities backgrounds are seen as typical of ALL of that category. A similar logic would relate terrorism to ALL engineers because of something like the Salem hypothesis.

The author touched on it, but I don’t think they addressed it enough - there is a societal rebellion amongst different cohorts as well. I think the “EOT” may have some truth, but to ascribe it as the source of unrest in society is in bad faith and politically motivated. The idea of reality vs expectation makes sense universally, and the bit about why free college is seen as a political objective makes sense and is an interesting idea.

One such rebellion is American uneducated white people voting for trump - and much more dramatically, later a small subset of them storming the capital. Lots of press ink has spilled over “white plight” and how the stagnation of the growth in quality of life among rural and blue collar white people. So I think saying EOT is the source of all unrest is wrong, but EOT could have truth to a specific democratic’s experience in america.

This author is well known for trolling the Jacobin Magazine crowd, so I feel a bit silly taking his arguments in good faith. But I can't help but point out how bizarre this statement is:

> It’s easy to draw a line between this unhappiness and the socialist movement in the U.S. Socialism rapidly became more popular among young Americans in the 2010s, and the Bernie Sanders movement exploded upon the national scene. The socialist movement has people from all classes, but overall it’s far from a proletarian movement — this is fundamentally a revolt of the professional-managerial class, or at least the people who expected their education to make them a part of that class.

Sanders did disproportionately well with voters without a college degree. If there is any candidate that fits the the author's concept, it would be Elizabeth Warren.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...

Jacobin is well known for being incredibly low quality journalism. So why would calling that out affect his credibility?

If you find this interesting, I suggest reading Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord, which factors this and other hypothesis into secular cycle models, which backfit nicely onto history.

I think the key point in this article, which I really enjoyed reading, is the difference between expectations vs. reality.

The truth is that our educational system at its highest levels - private schools through university and then most universities - makes students believe that anything is possible for them. That knowledge itself will be rewarded with monetary and societal returns. It's just not true.

Most people end up making great sacrifice either financially, socially (think moving away at 18), or both, and achieve an outcome that could've easily been replicated without that amount of effort.

It took me a while to accept that I did this, but once I did it made me feel better.

I wonder if there’s anything else that started happening in the late oughts that might explain the trend (to socialism) the author claims to see.

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